The YA Department

Friday, August 8, 2014

The Tiny Cooper Award for Best Supporting Character (TCABSC,
pronounced Tuh-Cab-Skuh) was created to honor those special guys and gals who,
while not the main focus of the book, are still extraordinary. TheTiny Coopers(Will
Grayson, Will Grayson),Anitas(West
Side Story), andRobins(Batman)
of the fictional world may not always get the girl (or guy), but sometimes they
fulfill their role of supporting or obstructing the lead character in such a
phenomenal way that it deserves special notice. This attention now comes in the
form of an imaginary award made up by me. Hey, they’re not the main characters,
so they have to take what they can get.

This Tiny Cooper Award for Best Supporting Character goes
to: Zuzana
from Daughter of Smoke & Bone,Days of Blood & Starlight, and Dreams of Gods and Monstersby Laini Taylor.

In lieu of five other nominees, here
are five reasons why Zuzana is awesome:

(spoilers for the three-book series

1) She
is uber talented. Zuzana comes from a family of puppet makers, but she
takes the art to a new level. Her final project for art school is a street
performance where she dances, acting as a marionette, attached by strings to a
giant puppet. So the puppeteer is actually the puppet! Brilliant!

Wednesday, February 26, 2014

If The Catcher in the Rye is
an adult novel, then why are so many teens obsessed with it? The distinction
between YA and adult fiction can be as thin as to be unnoticeable to the casual
observer. And such a petty thing as genre distinction will never hold back a
teen who loves reading. More than that, YA author Robin Wasserman, in an excellent essay about Stephen King’s ability to write great teen characters,
posits “There are some adult books that, for whatever reason, seem specially
formulated to wend their way into teenagers’ brains and take root, and I think
it’s because—like one of those high-frequency tones the rest of us are too old
to notice—these books are whispering secret truths certain teenagers need
to hear.” These are some books that whispered to me as a teen. And then
whispered again, and again, and again because I reread them so many times.

It by Stephen King

Here’s Robin Wasserman again: “What Stephen King reader didn’t fall in
love with him a teenager?” I fell hard when I read It. But I didn’t reread It for the way it made me terrified to go
to the bathroom or how I stayed up all night reading because I was afraid to
turn out the light. I reread it because it’s about a group of friends who love
each other, and how that love is the most powerful kind of magic. The young
versions of the characters are just on the cusp of puberty. The book’s
nostalgia for that age, as well as the late 1950s time period in which it is
set, perfectly reflect a teenager’s nostalgia for their lost childhood, which
seems to be an ocean of time away from their drastically different present. Also,
you’re welcome for not using one of the terrifying clown versions of this
book’s cover. I had the Tim Curry TV movie tie-in one, which had his picture on
the spine, and I would hide it behind my other books so that he couldn’t see
me. Eventually I just threw it away and bought another one, but I was still
scared it was going to reappear on my bookshelf one night, Talky Tina–style.

Thursday, February 6, 2014

"I suppose I'm admitting that those people who call young-adult readers "childish" are onto something. It's just not the pure desire for regression they pompously diagnose. It's a desire for stories substantial enough to withstand the ages, that are like smooth river rocks you can turn over and over again."

Thursday, January 30, 2014

When you hear the words "polar vortex," it doesn't make you want to go outside. The good news is that the recent spate of low temperatures are perfect for my favorite indoor activity: reading. Here are some wintery books to remind you how good you have it while you are curled up inside your warm house.

Ice by Sarah Beth Durst
Cassie lives with her father, a scientist, at a research station in the Arctic. When she meets a polar bear who tells her that her mother is not dead, as she had thought, but imprisoned at the end of the earth, Cassie desperately agrees to his price: marriage. But life in the polar bear's ice castle is neither cold nor terrifying, and Cassie comes to care for her bear husband. Until she makes a terrible mistake that sends her on a journey to save both her bear and her mother.

Sarah Beth Durst books are always lush, engrossing, and filled with pathos. This retelling of "East of the Sun and West of the Moon" effortlessly combines a coming-of-age story with romance and magic.

Thursday, November 7, 2013

Eliot Schrefer wrote a great online column for the Times about writing YA fiction. It comes the closest to describing my personal reasons for reading/writing YA of any of the other articles of this sort that I have read. Here's the gist:

"...what Y.A. novels value above all else is storytelling. It took me even longer to realize that that needn't lessen a book's complexity -- it just prioritizes the reader's experience. Ultimately, if there's a refrain I hear from the many adults turning to Y.A., it's not that the books are any simpler. They're just more pleasurable."

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Pardon me if
I’m a little weepy; I just finished reading Fangirl
by Rainbow Rowell. It’s a good weepy, the kind that lets you know that you’re
not ready to let go of that amazing book just yet. Eleanor and Park, Rowell’s last book, was perfectly sparse. Each
word fit precisely into place. Fangirl
is just as perfect, but longer and meatier. It’s the kind of book that you
disappear into while you’re reading.

Fangirl opens with Cath (full name:
Cather) leaving for college and hurt that her twin sister doesn’t want to room
with together. She’s not all that excited about college, either, or anything
that doesn’t involve writing fan fiction about the Simon Snow books—a Harry Potter-esque series of children’s fantasy
novels. Simon has always been her escape—from her mother leaving, from her
father’s mental health issues, from engaging with the world in a way that might
leave her vulnerable. But her blunt roommate and her roommate’s handsome and
friendly boyfriend won’t let her retreat completely. And a good-looking boy in
her fiction writing class is tempting her into writing about something other
than Simon. Is she ready to start her real life if it means letting go of
Simon?

Monday, October 28, 2013

Listening to other people describe their dreams can be the
most boring thing in the world. I know this. And yet I still can’t stop myself
from telling people, “I had the craziest dream last night…” Dreams come
straight from our raw emotional cores, which makes them a powerful experience
that so colors the waking world that we need to share them with someone else
just to continue our day. This also makes them extremely difficult to describe.
“I saw this pink poodle, only it wasn’t a normal poodle, it was really scary,”
doesn’t cover the visceral terror you felt when staring into the black,
soulless eyes of a girly hell-dog. Dreams have unstable settings, as well as mysteriously
vanishing and reappearing characters, and unresolvable plot holes. And yet Maggie
Stiefvater’s The Dream Thieves, a
book about dreaming, perfectly evokes the otherworldly feel of those nighttime
phantoms while still maintaining a stable base of story.